Behind Louie’s grill with Frenchie

It’s a lazy Tuesday morning at Louie’s, the popular diner on State Street in LSU’s shadow.

Customers perched on stools at the linoleum-topped white counter are sharing subdued conversations. My coffee arrives. As usual, it’s perfect. Breakfast, especially Louie’s Café’s trademark biscuit and hash browns, is superb.

But something’s missing. Then it hits me. It’s Frenchie’s day off.

Alas, the grill is tranquil. The frenetic Cajun with the do-rag and non-stop mouth—Marcus “Frenchie” Cox—is not there cracking eggs or jokes.

And Louie’s just isn’t the same.

For almost 70 years, Louie’s has been a Baton Rouge institution. The burgers and omelets are legendary; the biscuits, sublime.

But what truly distinguishes Louie’s is Frenchie, the self-described “Lord of the Grill.”

From my father: Be honest, tell the truth and don’t be afraid of hard work.

From my mother: I learned to bake from her. I learned to treat people with compassion.

About college students: You can see the good in them, and they’re resourceful.

About regular customers: I know what my regulars eat.

About drunk customers: We like to use the word “inebriated,” or perhaps, “just one or two too many.” For the most part, the behavior of 90% of the people who come in after 2 a.m. is fine. If you get, once in a while, somebody who’s had too much, you take him off to the side and get him a cab.

About making biscuits: Your dough has to be moist but not wet, and you can’t overwork it. It’s not like bread dough. You mix it; it gets moist. Biscuits make friends.

About work: No matter what you’re doing—if your job is to put the little stickers on the bell peppers—do it better than everybody else. It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it.

About marriage: That I’m not very good at it.

Plant yourself at the counter some morning—Frenchie is head fry cook Wednesdays through Sundays— and you will not only watch your meal cook; its preparation will be narrated in a fashion more frenzied and far more entertaining than anything on the Food Network.

Think Emeril Lagasse meets Groucho Marx.

A few days later, Louie’s is hopping. Frenchie is back. As he hovers over the grill, tending to orders of eggs, bacon and potatoes, he’s singing. “The tracks of your tears,” he belts out to no one in particular. A couple wanders in the door. “Hey, how y’all are?” he calls out as he and his fellow cooks conjure up multiple orders, working in flawless concert.

A few minutes later, there’s a minor snafu. An order hasn’t been prepared to Frenchie’s exacting standards, a sentiment he expresses to his colleague. “I ain’t mad with you, pal,” he says, his sonorous voice filling the room. “Just handle your business.” He repeats the admonition four times, so that it almost becomes a chant.

On another morning, a cheerful Frenchie paces at the grill. Suddenly, he looks up, amused, and asks a perplexed customer at the counter, “Who do you like in the third race at Evangeline Downs?”

At Louie’s, when Frenchie is on stage, there’s constant chatter and banter. One minute he’s completely focused on preparing one of Louie’s signature veggie omelets. The next he’s conversing with a customer about the quality of his biscuits. “If you think the biscuits look good, you should see my buns!”

So it has gone, day after day, for 23 years. Part cook, part stand-up comedian, the 57-year-old Mansura native has become the face of Louie’s and the reason some customers are so loyal.

Jim Engster, host of WRKF’s The Jim Engster Show, eats breakfast at Louie’s every day and has shown up almost every morning for 30 years. Frenchie is one reason he keeps coming back. “He puts on a show,” says Engster, who has put Frenchie on his show twice this year. “He’s an entertainer, in addition to being a consummate chef.”

Local money manager Andy Anderson is another regular. Anderson is so devoted to Frenchie’s cooking that he says he sold his Bocage home and moved near the LSU campus just to be closer to the restaurant. “Louie’s is just a part of my life, and so is Frenchie,” Anderson says.

“It’s really humbling to realize that you touch so many people’s lives and not even know it,” Frenchie says. “And all you do is maybe break an egg and tell a wise-ass joke.”

A Vietnam combat veteran who trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in 1976—“the community college of the Air Force,” he calls the experience—Frenchie has cooked for restaurants all over Baton Rouge since arriving in 1982, among them Juban’s, Mike Anderson’s, Ruffino’s and Chelsea’s. But Louie’s is his permanent home and his arena.

“It’s a stage,” admits Frenchie, who briefly worked as a stand-up comedian in Natchez, Miss., in the early 1980s.

Louie’s owner, Jimmy Wetherford, agrees the atmosphere fits Frenchie perfectly. “I think he likes being out front,” he says. “You know, in most kitchens you’re in the back. At Louie’s, you’re right there. You can see if they’re liking (the food) or not. And you can talk to them and they can talk to you. And he loves that.”

Away from work, Frenchie says he’s like many performers—quiet and shy. “There is a quiet side,” he says. “But all people know is the loudmouth, constantly talking, crazy Cajun guy.”

On days off, he dotes on his two dogs and performs volunteer yard work for a few friends, relatives and one charity, Connections for Life. He’s proud of his three grown children, three step-children and five grandchildren.

That’s the sensitive, caring side some don’t see.

Many customers don’t know that his mother, who taught him how to cook, died in the spring. These days, still in mourning, he doesn’t always feel cheerful and ebullient, at least as much as his customers might expect. But Frenchie tries to leave his woes at the door “and become Frenchie. The persona—the Louie persona. Because that’s what people come for.”

But he also knows it’s not the quality of his jokes that really brings back the customers. “It’s about the food. It has to be.” All the quips and jokes are great, Frenchie concludes, “but it’s got to be what you put across the counter.”